Scale Independent Thought

The Six Degrees of Connective Intelligence

This Summer solstice weekend, the conversation grids of Twitter and other social media networks brightly light up to align an international community of human revolutionaries - in solidarity with Neda’s compatriots worldwide. 

At this very moment, millions are uniting with their brothers and sisters in the streets of Iran. From thousands of miles away, the Internet brings information immediately between continents and countries as if from the same local community, unencumbered by spatial constraints and political borders.

The hashtags, #IranElection and #Neda become top trending topics on Tweetgrid, linking the Twitter community together to share the latest news minute by minute. Some offer links to the newest updated videos or blog posts, others share Google maps of Embassy locations for the wounded, others, through rapid access to indelible images and video streams, share the immediacy of their heartbreak over the victims - sons and daughters of our international online community.

A borderless community grid of hearts and minds strive for global transparency and share their hopes for freedom with a human country at the crossroads – all in real time. Even our most fleet footed news portals such as CNN and the BBC, denied access to direct information and media feeds, are turning to yesterday’s disruptive social technologies to lend a hand in spreading the word.

And soon, we will have, as we had with President Obama’s inaugural “tweetmap”, new visualizations of this rapid fire ‘global conversation.’ Mapped from data trails of these posts, rendered in seamless, synthetic relief, we will soon have a new dynamic map that puts a vision to this important milestone in the history of the connective mind.  Jeff Clark, also known as Neoformix to visualization buffs, has already provided a word cloud viz to this fleeting territory in his PhraseNet visualization. This one is based on 141,000 characteristic tweets from the Iran election.

This is the beginning of the streaming, conversational network of the realtime global community. Let’s think about it as a small world network.  Most have already heard about the six degrees of separation – how everyone on the planet is connected to everyone else by no more than six degrees. Here is a condensed evolution of small world theory in six steps.

This is the small world network:

1. that was discovered and named by social psychologist Stanley Milgram in 1967, who postulated that networks of clusters connected to other clusters with very few bridges,

2. Whose connections were popularized by the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game, “The Oracle of Bacon”

 

3. whose complex systems algorithm was proposed by Watson Strogatz, initiating a new “science of networks” 

 

4. whose collective dynamics were empirically proven by scientist, Duncan Watts (who, with Strogatz, proved exactly how the six degrees model worked in all types of networks).

Watts-Strogatz small-world model generated by igraph and visualized by Cytoscape 2.5. 100 nodes.

5. Whose science of scale-free networks was advanced by physicist Albert-Laszlo Barabasi who proved their distribution follows a specific power law, and this common blueprint can be seen in a vast array of networks – from intra-cellular protein networks to human social networks.

A network biology diagram, depicting a cluster of protein-protein interactions in yeast (Barabasi and Oltvai 2004)

6. whose dynamics were put to practical use through cognitive scientist Alessandro Vespignani’s research, applying network theory of computer viruses to human behavior in order to map how patterns of global transport networks can help us quickly respond to pandemic outbreaks.

 

Impact of Air Travel on the Global Spread of Infectious Diseases, by Vespignani, et.al.

  A brief history of a profound new way of thinking.  Small world theory shows that we are all nodes in a complex network of relationships binding each human being to every other by a maximum of only six degrees.  This proven theory is now a game changer for humanity, rather than a game. The Green revolution of Iran, where the heart of Neda is linked to the hearts of every one of us, is now a human revolution. And its outcome beckons each of us to willingly play our part for a better humanity – and to see how we already make a difference.

With new ways of thinking and “seeing”, we can begin to tell our condensed histories, and to envision new outcomes.  Each and every one of us must understand all too much in all too short a time. The survival of our species depends on it. And visualization technologies that help us do this are our most important tools for shared knowledge and global self-reflexivity.

A surprising initiative to break out of the institutions that hold back this many-to-many communication landscape is emerging from within the institutions themselves. A call and manifesto vastly different than those that came before.

Digital Humanities Seminar in Second Life

As a result of the year long, “Mellon Seminar 2008-09: What is(n’t) Digital Humanities?” at UCLA’s Digital Humanities and Media Studies Lab, a manifesto about the rapidly changing, open source nature of knowledge was developed: The Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0. Co-written by Todd Presner of UCLA and Jeffrey Schnapp of Stanford University, this document asks us to listen to what our symbiotic relationship with accelerated communication technologies mirrors back to us about the rapidly changing shape of humanity. Calling itself “an array of convergent practices,” the manifesto is a call to arms, urging us, “Lets get our hands dirty.” Its final paragraph states:

“…our vision is of a world of fusions and frictions, in which the development and deployment of technologies, and the sorts of research questions, demands, and imaginative work that characterize the arts and Humanities merge.”

We must learn to see the relationships between people, knowledge, ideas and activism - and to express and curate them through new technology-mediated art forms. As Twitter streams become maps to new global conversations, fresh perspectives of our collective history are also greatly needed. And many are already available. New maps of science offer us satellite views of humanity’s knowledge based on decades of citations indices. New clickstream maps of knowledge show us how the humanities and social sciences already cross-fertilize each other in ways we never thought were possible.

Places & Spaces: Mapping Science 

New and seasoned multidisciplinary forums for public discourse such as Edge.org and TED talks – all fully available for free - routinely bring our best minds together to synthesize perspectives from culture, art, technology and the sciences. As we work together to create a new “Google Earth” of global knowledge and sensemaking, synthetic minds will be the critical link that enables us to fly seamlessly between satellite views from space and time to local, immediate views from the ground. We are already co-creating a new visual syntax that can display the network effect of knowledge production. We are constructing new cartographies that highlight the complex interrelationships of our global narrative. Met with a new aesthetics of knowledge and human relationship, these tools encourage a more synthetic perspective for the challenges ahead.

The Challenge of Synthesis

“I agree with Nobel Laureate Murray Gell-Mann that the synthesizing mind will be the most valued mind in our century.” Howard Gardner, Five Minds for the Future

As time speeds up for all of us, and knowledge is distributed around us in a flurry of fragments and sound bites, we strive for tools that help us connect and synthesize vastly different pieces of information into a coherent whole. One iconic image from the middle of the 20^th Century comes to mind as I try to wrap my head around the grand challenge of synthesis – one by surrealist artist Salvador Dali. 

Many remember Dali best by the famous melting clocks in his Persistence of Memory; a poster version of this painting was hung in the dorms of more = college students in the past three decades than we could try to count. But a lesser known piece of Dali’s carries with it the confusions and juxtapositions of this new time we are embarking on, without forgetting the face of the past - the Exploding Raphaelesque Head.

The post-WWII style Dali himself deemed “nuclear mysticism,” was best embodied in this fascinating work.  In it, Dali renders the purity and grace of Greek, Roman and Renaissance art and architecture with a masterful hand. He then tears them to shreds to reflect the fresh, post nuclear world of 1951. Releasing the power of the atom bomb in the Vitruvian architecture of the great Roman Pantheon, the perspectivalism and perfect symmetry of Alberti and Leonardo is beautifully torn apart like a bursting balloon.

From the Pantheon’s oculus, luminous rays filter down through the crown of Raphael’s Christian Madonna. Her holy face becomes a locus for swirling particles, each shaped in three dimensions like dozens of horns from Albrecht Durer’s Rhinosceros – the iconic woodcut of 1515. Dali captures the modern world’s scientific vista by making subatomic matter newly visible. Yet now each is “spiritualized” in the spiral symmetry of every fragment. In the same way that the art of Leonardo and Durer brought forth a new approach to rendering three dimensions onto a 2 dimensional plane, five centuries ago, Dali’s artwork moves us from 3D to 4D, shattering our spatial conventions through the element of time and the juxtaposition of the atomic and human scale.  Without moving away from the Renaissance masters, Dali copies and envelops them instead, offering the viewer a series of nested compositions. These convergent sensibilities fully reflect Renaissance religious conventions and the scientific reality of the mid 20^th century at the very same time.

In today’s accelerated, mashable, emergent Web 3.0, in the conversational networks driven by a new generation of social media, reality has taken us to a similar place.  Now, like Dali’s patterned nuclear fragments in a symmetrical landscape, networked knowledge can be seen and understood in aggregated form through high resolution views of patterned data. Knowledge is color coded and particulate, swarming like schools of fish or flocks of birds into recognizable flows and related clusters. 

To read this new “language”, our minds must be flexible or, as curator Paola Antonelli suggests, “elastic.” We must adopt one of the five new “minds of the 21^st century” suggested by Howard Gardner – the synthesizing mind - as a lens in which to read these new pictures of knowledge and to discover the wisdom within. 

Clickstream Map of Science, Bollen, et.al.

This is what maps of knowledge look like today – the colorful image above shows us a new vista of meaningful connections existing between the humanities and the sciences. Johan Bollen, a researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico demonstrates the co-evolution and shared influence between disciplines in a new map based on Clickstream data. This map, based on a billion user interactions recorded by scholarly web portals, brings to life the collective knowledge flows between disciplines. The color coded nodes show clusters of relationships between information seekers, academic publishers and university consortia, gleaned from mapping access and usage patterns as readers click through journal articles on the Internet. Bollen and his associates’ visualization  represents a new generation of dynamic mapmakers taking science mapping one step closer to representing the influence of academic papers on a broad range of knowledge workers in addition to academics who publish and cite each others’ work. 

Manuel Lima, information architect whose Visual Complexity site has long been one of the premiere aggregators of visualization methods offers an important diagram for visualizing meaningful information:

And describes its power here:

Manuel Lima interview May 2009

In conclusion, the visual meditation I wrote above is based on what I would like to call the “Six Degrees of Connective Intelligence”:

1. Human stories become real time conversations documented on the social web
2. that link humans into complex conversational and activist networks
3. that leave information trails and data tracks we can turn into maps, artworks and visualizations
4. that we can draw from to synthesize new information
5. to tell ourselves richer, more comprehensive narratives and stories
6. to gain and share a higher level of collective wisdom

Synthetic Mind by Tony DeVarco

Salvador Dali juxtaposed the Renaissance symmetry with the atomic age of fragmentation, yet it was the synthetic mind of the artist that made this image resonate.  Now as we open our eyes to this new landscape of connectivity, complex systems, network science and the self reflexive global mind, as we tell our histories en masse and in unison, we too, will find richer, more beautiful ways to envision this truth.  ~ Bonnie DeVarco

Envisioning Guinea Pig “B”

Before e-mail, blogging and IM, before Mind Mapping, Lifestreaming and MyLifeBits, before Web 2.0, InfoVis, Wikis, Flickr, Twitter and Twine, the “world’s friendly genius” was creating and documenting his life and the life of those around him in a way millions of people are just beginning to do today. Buckminster Fuller is, simply put, the most well documented human of the 20^th century

Life, Facts & Artifacts Word Cloud created in Wordle

In 1927 Fuller embarked upon a lifetime experiment as Guinea Pig “B”.  He would document his life in a most comprehensive manner in order to demonstrate and articulate what “one man could do on behalf of all humanity.” Thinking this experiment would last only about a decade, he actually lived much longer– finally leaving our planet just days short of 88 years. Now Bucky’s 56-years of self documentation is unparalleled in history - his collection was deemed by the Smithsonian in 1985 the “most extensive personal archive” and one of the most unique collections in existence. 

The fully documented life of any individual might be interesting to some - witness the rapid proliferation of personal blogs in cyberspace today. Yet Buckminster Fuller’s life was far from ordinary. He embarked on his experiment at a unique time in our history – a time of rapid industrialization, the birth of modernism and what Fuller himself called the transition from “a Newtonian to Einsteinian world.” He also played a role in the most interesting cultural intersections of American innovation, influencing the frontiers of vintage futurism, the emergent union of Nature and the arts, the illuminated shadows of transclassical architecture, the uncharted scientific territory of nanoscale design and the emergent future of communications technology. 

A glimpse of Bucky's social network in - what else? - a buckyball!

Known to his friends (who included everyone he knew and met) as “Bucky”, he was a dense node in a powerful network of leading edge thinkers every decade of his enormously prolific life. He was also an innovator, Renaissance man and one of the most notable figures of the 20th century. He utilized all forms of media available to him to document his life: wire recordings, audio & video tape, letters, transcripts, photos, slides, manuscripts, books, articles, clippings and a broad range of ephemera. As an inveterate writer, lecturer, world traveler, architect, mathematician and inventor, Fuller left thousands of articles, 28 published books, 25 U.S. patents, hundreds of architectural artifacts and models embodying the “universal principles” he discovered. 

Although he dropped out of Harvard twice, by 1983 Fuller taught at over 150 universities, received 47 honorary doctorates and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Yet perhaps only in the invisible architecture of information in the materials Bucky compiled during his lifetime experiment as Guinea Pig “B” can his methodology of planetary problem solving and scale independent thought be truly understood. Looking closely at his work and the extraordinary collection housed at Stanford University, there will be no doubt that Buckminster Fuller was the prototypical Planetary Citizen and a model for the mobile, connected human and global problem solver of today. 

If we could visualize the sweeping arcs and angles of this archival artifact - the collection of Guinea Pig “B” - we would see a beautiful series of intersecting patterns. We might even begin to hear a musical cadence, the sweeping symphony of the evolution of his thoughts and ideas. Fuller himself would have called this the frequency modulations of his partially overlapping scenario Universe. This is a vision worth exploring.

Crowdsourcing Communitas

New Vistas of the Community Self

“We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely."  E.O. Wilson, Consilience

Aggregation, Integration, Synthesis. These are the goals of tomorrow’s knowledge workers. Yet these are already the salient characteristics of today’s flowing data visualizations.

A clip from the BBC’s 2008 “Britain from Above” captures GPS Traces of planes in British air spaces and second-by-second tracks of British chatter.

  Here we are, on the other side of Moore’s Law, our sophisticated technologies moving briskly up the now vertical arc to what Ray Kurzweil termed “The Singularity” - a time when technological change is so fast that our tools outstrip our ability to control them, when machines become more intelligent than humans. On our way up this curve, we also confront ourselves with another new phenomenon as our many-to-many global communication and sensing tools send images back to us from abstract space.

  We can now speed up time to visualize the dynamic aggregations of collective thought, the strange attractors of knowledge, the pulsing nodes of communication and the buzzing, self-assembly of networked human activity. These patterns invoke shades of what Stephen Jay Gould described as the “punctuated equilibrium” of evolutionary behavior and reflect what Buckminster Fuller called the “partially overlapping scenario Universe.” This new genre of dynamic, illuminated visions have come alive with full-blown intensity before our collective eyes. These visions are at once disarming, evocative, enlightening.

 Media artist, designer and researcher Aaron Koblin’s animation of flight paths across America - 2008

These fresh, dynamic vistas are bathed in patterned symmetry - a complex geometric confluence of color and light. Whether we look at the dance of orbs called “Universe - 6 Billion Humans, 6 Billion Colors” on the screen of our Nokia cell phones in the morning, or view the neon webworks of Britain’s flight paths over time on a larger screen, we can see the rapid pulse of planetary activity caught as never before. Similar to the first Blue Marble image of Earth from Space, these new visions of group movement in timespace unite broad swaths of the mobile connected human - the many - into a unified, multifarious identity - a groupmind. We are less the Singularity than The Multiplicity. 

Nokia E71 launch / 6 Billion People, 6 Billion Colours from Universal Everything on Vimeo.

  Like Kevin Kelly’s “One Machine” or OM, we have together found a converging technological palette that allows us to tell our story to ourselves through a new medium. And it looks beautiful. Artists, musicians poets, architects have long shaped the story of humanity in their sculptures, poetry, their paintings, songs and buildings.  A new generation of aesthetic programmers, designers and Information architects now take the helm as the synthesizers, capturing streams of collective emotional intelligence, wrapping them with color and shape, in silky tendrils of light, letting them speak a new language – whispering visually the subtext of our species. 

A new poetics of technology is born.  Poetry, having always emerged in the space between chisel and stone, hand and brush, thought and pen, emerges once again, yet now between mind and code. Beautiful data. With the fusion of humans and their tools, the science of design and data mining reach a new milestone to become a new mirror of communitas. Design scientists, data artists, programmers such as Aaron Koblin, Chris Harrison, Jonathan Harris, Moritz Stefaner, Sep Kamvar, Jonathan Harris, Martin Wattenberg, Fernanda Viegas and Jeffrey Heer bring a fresh new face to collaborative data design and information aesthetics, the new language of connectivity.  As mesmerizing as they are informative, their technological artworks render compelling the patterns of activity, capturing the mobility of thought.

  What is both the driving force and the eventual result of these emergent visual mediums?  Crowdsourcing, actionable knowledge and connective, distributed intelligence. I suggest the following formula:

Data is the key

Disciplined, strategic crowdsourcing is the methodology

Visualization is the language

Who is using this formula successfully?  Some of our most seasoned media groups such as the New York Times, Time/Life, Wired and SEED Magazine. Who are the people to watch?  They are young, fiercely aesthetic computer scientists and designers, often new professors in our best universities or graduate students immediately brought into the creative centers of Google, Microsoft, IBM and other industry leaders.   Yet many of their technologies emerge as open source tools and are used and developed further by thousands of other programmer artists.  Most of their images and videos immediately become viral.  And often their projects, such as Aaron Koblin and Takahashi Kawashima’s Ten Thousand Cents,  whose proceeds went to the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) initiative, offer financial benefits to decrease the digital divide. This is why their work is so important – these projects both sow the seeds for and demonstrate the benefits of crowdsourcing.

Ten Thousand Cents from Ten Thousand Cents on Vimeo.

  CROWDSOURCING – In circulation for less than a few years, this broadly accepted meme will bring well over a million hits on a Google search.  The neologism itself was coined by Steve Jurvetson in his one sentence entry on a public forum in one of the most robust of Web 2.0’s visual crowdsourcing tools, Flickr. A new meme was born.  Crowd sourcing means community-based design or participatory, distributed design.  Essentially it is the application of open source principles to things other than software – such as content or design. 

There were many examples of crowdsourcing before there was even a term for them – the most well known example might be the SETI@Home Project  that put out an open call for people to use spare processing power on their home computers. Through the distribution of free screensavers, the SETI Project attracted over three million users to help them search for extraterrestrial intelligence in space.

Wikipedia, WikiMapia and MediaWiki, Gigapan, Youtube and Flickr base their growth of content on the principle of crowdsourcing. Google has applied it often to help develop, enhance and scale their applications such as Google Earth. In the best sense of the word, crowdsourcing is the application of a phenomenon described by James Surowiecki as the “wisdom of crowds” and by Howard Rheingold as SmartMobs in his 2002 book by the same name.

Journalist Jeff Howe first identified crowdsourcing in his June 2006 article in WIRED. By early 2008 he wrote and published the first book on it and crowdsourced the cover art.  Crowdsourcing has been criticized by some, called “digital sharecropping” or demoted as an applied way to amplify mediocrity. But it has also been seen as a direct outgrowth of collaborative Web 2.0 technologies and lauded by popular technorati blogs such as ReadWriteWeb where it is described as “a million heads are better than one.” Many new projects are catching the wave of applied crowdsourcing.

By late 2008 numerous crowdsourcing projects and portals had been launched, some already very successful, including 99 Designs to revolutionize branding, Threadless, a T-shirt design hub for the masses and the Intel/ASUS project WebPC  whose aim is to crowdsource the community design of the dream PC. Even President Barak Obama’s campaign drew much of its power from the judicious and creative crowdsourcing.

Crowdsourcing was a common way to homestead virtual worlds in the late 1990s. When the ActiveWorlds virtual universe launched, they opened up to widespread building of 3D content by hundreds of users. The results were easy to see in the first satellite maps of AW over the first three years of its use:

Roland Vilett generated three satellite maps of AciveWorlds between 1996 and 1999

Here we see the same phenomenon happening in the real world as colorful meridians of the planet light up in one year of edits in OpenStreetMap. The OSM mapper was created by ITO, a UK-based company founded by Peter Miller and Hal Bertram. It is the largest open source map of the entire world – completely developed by crowdsourcing!  It began in 2004, and by 2008 four times as many people were adding to it daily, autogenerating maps with GPS, adding satellite photos or out of copyright maps for every locale on the planet. Miller created a video showing the year of edits occurring in 2008 clearly showing in dynamic relief, the power and value of tools that harness distributed Intelligence, the “wisdom of crowds.”

OSM 2008: A Year of Edits from ItoWorld on Vimeo.

  It is already becoming clear that the new semantic social networks based around knowledge sharing (such as Twine) will leverage the power of intelligent crowdsourcing to a degree we have not yet seen. Although it allows only 140 character entries, one could easily call the microblogging tool, Twitter with its endless spinoff of applications around the API, the perfect crowdsourcing phenomenon. TwitterMosaic is a Twitterer who asks for people to follow him so he can regularly create mosaics with their snapshots using an open source tool.  By July 6, 2008, he had mosaic’d the famous 1972 Blue Marble image of Earth with 1325 followers.  At the time of this writing, he has 3259 followers.

 

FACES of EARTH - 1972 NASA Blue Marble image of Earth as a Twitter Mosaic.

 Crowdsourcing as a Beneficial Tool for Change

"If success or failure of the planet and of human beings depended on how I am and what I do ...
How would I be? What would I do?"     R. Buckminster Fuller

To be a sustainable and benevolent force, the most ideal application of crowdsourcing works as a strategic and disciplined long-term strategy that benefits everyone involved.  It should bring out the best in crowds by enhancing and supporting their individual and shared creativity. Visualization technologies allow us to take a peak at crowdsourcing phenomena, offering us a way to view its power and scope. 

  This profusion of crowdsourced activities using visualization technologies hit a tipping point with the inauguration of President Barak Obama in January, 2009.  These visualizations showed the power of such open source tools, content and conversations, and embody the spirit of communitas in our own country and around the world. Some examples below show how they have helped us vision the sweep of a new zeitgeist. 

  A project of Flowing Data in January captured the flow of people’s positive comments around the world in realtime during the day of the inauguration.

 

Screenshot of Flowing Data’s timelapse animation  shows worldwide Twitter positive comments on the Inauguration.

GeoEye’s high resolution satellite image of the inauguration gives us pause as we take in the power of crowds from a half meter above the capital.

The amazing 3D photo mapping tool, Photosynth wraps photos taken by a diversity of producers together into a seamless mosaic. Layers of points of view are unified with aesthetic concision and the new image can be navigated from any point of view.  Yet tools like this also beg the question, who owns what?  We all own the final creation and can access its constituent parts. Photosynth is shown off in the video below with 613 photos taken during the inauguration on January 20, 2009.

A screencast showing Barack Obama’s inauguration on January 20th 2009 in Photosynth

The emergent status of copyright and copyleft crowdsourced visualizations has begun to push us into new territory that helps to redefine and extend our notions of fair use.  With mashups driving the rapid creation of new forms of crowdsourced media, we will soon see the next iteration of Creative Commons’ efforts to support a global participatory culture of media sharing.  Take the famous HOPE poster of Barak Obama as a case in point. When outsider artist Shepard Fairey created what is now called by its crowdsourced name, the “Hope Obamacon” during the primaries, he based it on an image of Obama taken by photographer Mannie Garcia and owned by the AP. At the time, Fairey didn’t even know who took the photo. But crowdsourcing created the demand for his powerful image during the year that followed and it became so popular that Obama’s campaign adopted it as the iconic image for the inauguration.  Soon after, the AP, who owned Mannie’s photo took out a lawsuit against Fairey.

 

Now Larry Lessig, the law Professor who put a legal lens on the age of hybrid media by founding the Fair Use Project at Stanford University is crowdsourcing a resolution to the “fair use case” by representing Fairey and opening up his blog to public discourse and input on the source images.  The most interesting side note of this entire affair is that neither Fairey nor Garcia received income from this now famous artwork.

Why is this important?  Because within a few years, perhaps even a few months (in a Moore’s Law timescale) of this writing, we will see the next wave of the power of crowdsourcing. What these visualizations of one of the watershed moments in America’s history portend for the global future is important.  With the rapid, distributed creation and sharing of media, we are becoming a self-reflexive human superorganism with the ability to look at who we are en masse.  At first glance that statement may seam like hyperbole. But let’s look closer at the mainstream context of visualization and crowdsourcing.

On October 27, 2008, the New York Times opened their online public visualization lab partnering with the IBM’s ManyEyes  visualization toolset. They now encourage their readers to discover and share their own visual representations of trends using the latest research and statistics on popular issues such as the global economy, city-based SAT performance or the presidential election results. Visualizations are added to an open archive with a comment function for each, becoming catalysts for further discussion and connective intelligence.

In January 2008, the Library of Congress decided to crowdsource undescribed photos from their archives. Publishing 3,115 vintage photos to Flickr, LOC appealed the Flickr social network for crowdsourced tagging of the photos.  In November of 2008, Life Magazine in collaboration with Google released high resolution scans of 20 percent of their archive of 10 million mostly unpublished photos. These photos date back to the 1750s. With very little detailed annotations, crowdsourcing will be the phenomenon that brings a more detailed context to each photo.

On March 5, 2009 Barak Obama appointed his new Federal Chief Information Officer, Vivek Kundra. Kundra's work with crowdsourced data visualization tools (such as those from Tableau Software and Google Earth) for crime and disaster response was recognized during his earlier role as the CTO on Mayor Adrien Fenty's cabinet  for the District of Washington D.C.  In November 2008 Kundra had said: “When I first came on board as a Chief Technology Officer, I walked out of my place, went to the local coffee shop and I discovered sitting in that coffee shop that I had more computing power than the average police officer in the District of Columbia, the average teacher and the average person who was issuing tickets.” His emphasis is on amplifying the effective use of publicly available visualization tools to help the government serve the public's needs - now he will no doubt be doing this on a national scale.

SEED, a magazine that captures the zeitgeist as no other does, is now launching a visualization arm - the SEED Visualization Unit. They have hired one of the pioneer information aestheticians, MIT’s Ben Fry as its Design Director. They will partner with SEED’s research arm Phyllotaxis Lab, (their now famous Phylotaxis visualization was created by Jonathan Harris) as well as academic institutions around the world to provide education in the field of data visualization.

The few examples above begin to point to exemplars who use this formula:

Data is the key

Disciplined, strategic crowdsourcing is the methodology

Visualization is the language

  Here is why the formula works. Often some of our greatest ideas and their original contexts get lost, or vastly modified on their way up in the companies and institutions, the hierarchies and bureaucracies, creating barriers of access to genius between brainchild and figurehead. Now in the age of timecoded public conversations on microblogs and lifelogs, many-to-many direct feeds are taking place in a new “Agora” of public discourse. A new type of distributed genius is being picked up. We have entered the age of Collective, Connective, Distributed Intelligence.  Crowdsourcing is a modus oprandi for the brilliant generativity of our emergent digital commons.

When the shared creativity of the human spirit is unleashed and sees its reflection at the same time, we are offered a new vision of the collective self, of communitas in action. As we send back these crowdsourced images to the community self, we can begin to SEE the organism. We can make out its shimmering presence, and it is beginning to speak back to us.

*******

Aesthetics of the Connective Mind

“Nothing fundamental separates the course of human history from the course of physical history, whether in the stars or organic diversity. Astronomy, geology, and evolutionary biology are examples of primarily historical disciplines linked by consilience to the rest of the natural sciences." E.O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge

            For some time, we have been witnessing what Buckminster Fuller called “accelerating acceleration.” Whether we admit it or not, each and every one of us feels this evolutionary shift in the speed of change – it’s palpable. We are becoming comfortable with history in motion, where we tell our generational stories without losing their dynamism, where we wrap our hands and heads around the union of the microcosm of mind and the macrocosm of the known Universe. We are rapidly developing new communication tools to express it and new arts to envision it.

Visualizing the Bible  -  Chris Harrison and Christoph Römhild collaborated to create this beautiful image above. It is agreed by many to be one of the most poetic data visualizations ever created. The rainbow colored arcs illuminate the 63,779 cross references found within the Bible. 

            The rapid proliferation of new communication tools and information have split our attention, scattered our minds and fragmented our thinking processes. Yet at the very same time we are creating new visual languages to express these massive amounts of data and to envision our human communication patterns. We map the cross-fertilization of ideas and aggregated communities of action and purpose. We visualize the fusion of social networks, the elastic unity of the creative urge, the emergence of new fields, disciplines and paradigms.  And as these maps and visualizations converge, we recognize a more overarching shape, a combined presence that can only be felt and seen, but not described. 

            We need to move to a new "pattern language" to find a unifying vision for the profusion of media and information that confronts us every day. We need to understand patterns of data from a broader point of view and continuously visualize how we fit into the image of the whole. We are part of a mosaic that cannot be accessed linearly or in pieces.  But we do recognize it when we see it.

Twingly Screensaver - Visualizing the Blogosphere 

            What are the essential characteristics of this recognizable mosaic, this complex, convergent image of the whole? In a return to very ancient ideas, four words may come together to describe it – integritas, consonantia, claritas and communitas. In the 13^th century, theologian and philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas deemed the first three Latin terms the essential qualities of beauty in his Summa Theologiae. To these three terms I will add another Latin term, communitas, which was rescued in the 1980s in the anthropological study of the ritual process.  Together these four terms below capture an understanding of visualization that offer an exquisite way to think about today's mirrors of connective intelligence.

            Integritas is translated as “wholeness” or “completeness” - the realization of perfection. According to Umberto Eco, integritas means “the presence in an organic whole of all the parts which concur in defining it as that which it is.” The word integritas captures the essential soul of the thing, the moment when it transcends mere representation. Buckminster Fuller popularized a scientific word for the intentional application of integritas – synergy – where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Now this word is used to characterize everything from group cooperation in corporate environments to Toyota’s hybrid technology – “Synergy Drive.”

            Consonantia is pragmatically applied in the most ancient principle of architecture – the “divine proportion.” Intentionally used by architects, stone masons, artists, musicians and designers for centuries, consonatia means proportion and harmony – where the parts come together in a unified way and each part mirrors and reflects the whole.

            Claritas, “radiance” or “spendor” is the unique and present essence of the thing itself. It is both the pleasure and truth of each aspect and the universal qualities in the whole – its brilliance and luminosity. Claritas is the quality that allows beauty to illuminate its beholder, where intellect and intuition converge in its encounter.

            Communitas is the spirit of community. Cultural anthropologist Victor Turner borrowed the Latin word, communitas to describe an essential element of the ritual experience - the communal nature of shared liminality. When individuals are liminal, they are ambiguous, in transition. When a group of individuals share an ephemeral identity during rites of passage, communitas is often experienced. According to Turner, communitas is marked by the sacred – a feeling of togetherness that is closer than that allowed under normal conditions. Sometimes called “unity consciousness,” communitas is a transient state – it does not last - yet participants are transformed in some way by their experience of it.

            As our collective perception is reshaped by the dynamic reflection of the whole, these four terms merge into a new way of telling the history of beauty and describing modern aesthetics of connective intelligence. Where Goethe called architecture “frozen music” our new information architectures today are nothing if not fluid. 

Information aesthetics elevates our understanding of the organism while at the same time bringing the laboriously abstract considerations of aesthetics down to manageable size. We “get” these pictures. They speak to us viscerally, they beguile us, they are attractive.  They speak across scale, geography, culture, class and point of view; They unify our understanding by personalizing it, by helping us see where each and every one of us fits into the whole.  They have integritas. And, like the first Earthrise image, they engender communitas, mirroring the unity of the organism as they enhance our collective vision, our connective mind, through the act of looking. 

These old Latin terms from the history of aesthetics have a new ring when we speak in the language of pattern about the emerging global mind. This new art form for connective intelligence reflects the aggregated patterns of humanity, the dance of communication and the circuits of shared knowledge in ways that ignite our intuition and stir our emotions. 

We have emergent memes and new portals as creative design and aesthetics meets information visualization. Andrew Vande Moere at the University of Sydney’s Information Aesthetics weblog, exploring the “symbiotic relationship between creative design and the field of information visualization,” is one of them. Infosthetics is one of a new generation of pointers to something larger, something that is shifting from infancy to its next stage – a generative mosaic of connective intelligence. As economic systems collapse around the world, a new sense of the collective self is rising through this global brain trust. And in 2009, SIGGRAPH Conference is encouraging this shift by developing a new thematic area for Information Aesthetics, the “Information Aesthetics Showcase.”  Vande Moere just posted an interview with the curator of this showcase, Victoria Szabo on his blog here. 

In the next few entries I will highlight some of today’s dynamic visualizations that best embody these essential qualities of beauty: Integritas, Claritas,Consonantia and Communitas.

The Veil of Hypatia

“Raphael paints wisdom…” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Raphael’s Great Room

School of Athens is an iconic fresco, almost as well known as Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper. Raphael’s Sanzio’s most celebrated masterpiece conveys, perhaps better than any other single artwork, the Renaissance return to Classical thought.

In the center foreground of the painting, we recognize Raphael’s contemporary, Leonardo da Vinci as Plato, holding the book Timaeus and pointing up to the sky. His companion, Aristotle gestures his forefinger down to the Earth, grasping his book Ethics with his left hand. This section of Raphael’s painting – in the center of the Lyceum - has been used on the cover of countless philosophy textbooks, making the snapshot of these two most important figures in the history of ideas as iconic as the artwork itself. We also see Michelangelo who was busy next door painting the interior of the Sistine Chapel, depicted as Greek philosopher Heraclitus, crouching in the foreground next to a solid cube of marble. His was the very last image to be included in the painting.

The School of Athens is part of a much larger masterwork, one of the most impressive immersive paintings or “virtual worlds” ever designed in the past 500 years. This painting represents only one frescoed wall of the most brilliantly illustrated room in history – the Stanza della Segnatura, one of “Raphael’s Rooms” in the Papal Palace of the Vatican. Michelangelo’s famous Sistine Chapel is much more widely known than Raphael’s Stanza and towers above it at almost four times its size. But the walls of this small room have held one of the world’s most intriguing stories. For its beauty and opulence this room is visited daily by hundreds of tourists to the Vatican - all who are unaware that the Stanza della Segnatura holds an important key to visual language with a host of secrets embedded inside.

The Stanza della Segnatura is at once temporal, spatial, literal, symbolic and metaphorical. Every square inch of the room shimmers with significance. The most memorable of Raphael’s four stanzas is a sophisticated expression of Ars Memoria, a 3-dimensional “book of books,” a history in geometry and image. As an immersive tribute to humanity, this room holds no equal. Yet for the first two centuries after it was created, this stanza, a private library to the popes and the room where the most important documents were signed, was only seen by the eyes of the few elite elders in the heart of the Vatican Church.

The stanza’s iconographic narrative and its harmonic interplay between contradictory traditions forms a visual symphony that has beguiled generations of art historians. The elusive meanings and vibrant mastery of visual language in the stanza have drawn many interpretations of through time.  To this day, new analyses continue to surface as we try to deconstruct the intent behind the many signs and symbols Raphael wove into his masterwork.

Through the gilded paintings of the room’s interior, Raphael enhanced the proportions of the ceilings in order to capture the wisdom of the divine macrocosm. He used one of the curved walls to frame the ideals of science in the architecture of ancient philosophy. He imbued another with the dimensions of heaven and the evolution of 1500 years of Christianity.

With a deft hand, the “Prince of Painting” articulated the point of view from the middle of the room, leading our eyes up to Mount Parnassus, home of the Greek God Apollo and the ancient abode of the Muses. Here he filled the mountain with mythic history, epic poetry and lyric song from the ancient, classical and medieval worlds. Finally, in the Cosmatesque mosaics of the stanza’s spectacular marble floor, Raphael’s geometric iconography echoed the traditions of the Jews, the Persians, the Romans, and the Greeks through symmetric pattern, repetition and ratio.

The images on every square inch of Raphael’s immersive masterpiece unify poetry, theology, jurisprudence and philosophy through simple themes of “Beauty, Truth and Goodness.” During the height of humanism, its pervasive symbolism also unified Paganism, Pythagoreanism, Neoplatonism, the Torah, the New Testament of Christianity, Zoastrianism and the Kabbalah. It was only through Raphael’s consummate mastery that this room, with its intentional fusion of religious symbolism and the figures of ancient science, was able to remain intact in the heart of the Roman Catholic Church for over 500 years.

The Cartone of Raphael

In School of Athens, we will recognize many ancient historical figures – Euclid, Diogenes, Averroes, Epicurus, Zeno, Socrates, Alcibiades. Yet it is who we do not recognize that matters most in the syncretic history captured by Raphael.  This ambiguous figure cloaked in pure white, whose painted semblance on the left of the fresco looks more like Raphael himself who stands to the right of the wall next to Zoroaster and Ptolemy - each balancing spheres of Celestial and Terrestrial worlds in their hands.  Yet this striking figure seems to be set apart from the whole. Standing out in counterpoint, she looks straight at us from the painting, as if Raphael was beckoning the viewer to look more closely at this figure in his crowd of mental giants. Her feminine presence in the left of this masterful fresco, looking out behind Pythagoras himself, can be seen even more clearly in the visage that set the stage for Raphael's painting – the cartone.

New historians may begin to rewrite this history of intentional error. They will be aided by the difference that appears between Raphael’s sketch and his finished fresco. His cartone laid bare a unique kind of face. It is the face of the woman who stood at the crossroads between ancient art, science, philosophy and the medieval rise of the religious world - the last scientist/curator of the great Library in Egypt - philosopher, scientist and mathematician, Hypatia of Alexandria. 

Derived from Italian, cartone means “paper”. Paper can be traced back to the year 105 CE in China and paper production to the 6^th century. From there papermaking spread to Baghdad and Morocco between the 8^th and 10^th centuries and much later, to Europe. Italian Renaissance masters used paper and an ancient practice to set their first iteration of their frescos onto the walls.

We can see the first intentional image of hands depicted on the walls of Las Cuveas de los Manos in Argentina. Over 8000 years ago, Neolithic artists blew powdered colors around the outlines of their fingers, leaving an indelible mark on the history of art and communication. 

 

Returning to the same age old practice as these artists used, Raphael, Leonardo and Michelangelo each sketched full-sized cartoons of their large murals on the paper and pricked tiny holes along the contours. They then would blow charcoal through tiny holes onto the walls beneath. Each charcoal “sketch” blown onto the wall would lay the figured groundwork for the intricate painting that followed. When the mural was complete, the cartoons themselves would often be destroyed.

 

Raphael’s complete cartoon for School of Athens is considered “the most remarkable object of its kind surviving from the Renaissance.” As the largest and most well known example of this obscure genre of preparatory art, Raphael’s unique artifact also tells a visual story behind the story.

"Unveiling Hypatia" digital montage by Tony DeVarco

Hypatia's Veil

In Raphael’s cartone of a roomful of men, one figure wears the classic transparent veil of a woman – a common article of clothing in Renaissance paintings. Looking closely at Hypatia’s face in the cartoon, you can just make out the veil above her eyes. The same veil that is not present in the final painting.

Hypatia’s eyes carry with them a famous secret we’ve danced around for centuries.  A story is told that when Raphael completed the cartoon for his fresco and showed it to the bishops, they were appalled that he would depict a “known heretic” in the center of the painting. Her presence in the painting would run counter to the beliefs of the faithful. They refused to let him include Hypatia.  Raphael complied; he dropped the veil and changed the eyes a little to make her face a bit less feminine. But the figure was kept intact in the final painting – she was still there enveloped in a bright white oversized cloak. Yet even the most up to date edition of the book sold at the Vatican on the Sistine Chapel and Raphael’s Stanzas, states that the figure in white is based on Francesco Maria Della Rovere, the Duke of Urbino, the nephew of Pope Julius II who originally commissioned the room. Lost is any reference to Hypatia.

In the same way that controversial installation The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago celebrates through art what still cannot be discussed in our history texts or religious institutions, Raphael ignited our memories of female intelligence with his veiled inclusion of one of our greatest ancient scientists.

The Dinner Party was a powerful collaborative artwork produced in the mid-1970s by Judy Chicago and a number of artists - it became a landmark in feminist art. The installation featured a huge triangular table with place settings for 39 historical and mythical women - 13 on each of its three sides. The triangle was surrounded by tiles inscribed with the names of 999 other notable women. Chicago's stated purpose for this piece was to "end the ongoing cycle of omission in which women were written out of the historical record." It was donated to the Brooklyn Museum in 2007 for permanent display.  In one of the three corners of this famous triangular table sits Hypatia's beautiful place setting, amongst the settings for other dinner guests whose names must still be reinjected into our conversations - Hildegard von Bingen, Saint Bridget, Sappho, Aspasia, Boudica, Eleanor of Aquitaine and so many others. Jan Du Bois, one of Judy's collaborators spent one year of the five year project to embroider and weave Hypatia's memorable place setting.

Each generation, women come together to help each other tell our lost and forgotten stories - more often than not, using the language of art. Photographer Barbara Morgan’s profoundly singular image  of Martha Graham’s most famous solo,  Lamentation captures her fully veiled in a jersey tube.

Barbara's famous photograph of Lamentation strangely resembles the outlines of contemporary Taliban women in their blue full figure obscuring burqas. Images of women in these settings ask us to feel so emotionally present that we may decide to cast aside all painful veils and speak a different kind of truth.

Martha Graham discusses her 1930 dance, Lamentation followed by the solo

Remembering Hypatia

Born in year 370 of the Common Era, Hypatia was a highly respected scientist and beloved teacher in her day; she curated thousands of intellectual works in the great library of Alexandria before its final demise.  But her untimely, violent death is as remarkable as her life, and is a tale told more often than the story of her influence on the history of philosophy, astronomy and mathematics.

Hypatia’s brutal murder occurred when she was at the youthful age forty-five. The Church was rising up to stamp out the last vestige of Paganism and Neoplatonism, and with it, much of ancient science. Fifth century historian, Socrates Scholasticus writes “…they took her to the church called Caesareum, where they completely stripped her, and then murdered her by scraping her skin off with tiles and bits of shell. After tearing her body in pieces, they took her mangled limbs to a place called Cinaron, and there burnt them.” Saint Cyril, the Archbishop of Alexandria, was found to have incited the band of Christians to kill her. He was sainted by the Church 1300 years after her murder.  

What happened to our memory of Hypatia’s contributions to the history of human knowledge? Her design for the plane astrolabe and invention of the hydrometer influenced the long development of our scientific instruments. Her work was expanded on by Descartes, Newton and Leibniz, but her name was not included. Her commentaries on Apollonius’ Conics and Diophantus’ Arithmetica likely influenced Johannes Kepler’s discovery of first law of planetary motion and his famous conjecture on the close packing problem. To this day we still do not know how much of her father Theon’s work Hypatia actually wrote herself.  But these are liminal stories that nobody asks about and very few tell.

We can find such stories in the margins of historical narrative, in the illuminated ambiguity of our most treasured artworks. They are released through the brush of the artist and pen of the poet, the fiction of the novelist and the quasi-histories of contemporary film. They elevate our understanding without challenging our belief systems, without upsetting the status quo – through beauty, lyrical song and powerful entertainment. Most of us have learned to tell our bright truths circuitously, abiding by Emily Dickenson’s dictum, “Tell the truth, but tell it slant -success in circuit lies -too bright for our infirm delight -the truth’s superb surprise.”  

Yet some of us have gone straight to the point.

In the 13th episode of his classic series Cosmos first shown in 1980, Carl Sagan takes us from Eratosthenes who first measured the sphere of Earth to Ptolemy who started the Library of Alexandria to the many scholars who worked there through its centuries long history. He comes to the story of Hypatia and the demise of the largest library in history with our loss of thousands of history’s most important works. 

In “Who Speaks for Earth?” Sagan provides the historic context and offers a contemporary moral for Hypatia’s story. He goes out on a limb to show his personal point of view by offering an extraterrestrial view our civilization - a view that can only come from looking back at Earth from space. He describes the exorbitant cost of the nuclear threat, the senselessness of war and the indulgence of nationalism; he decries the overabundance of racial, sexual and religious chauvinism.  He chastens the last gasp of this outmoded form of human enterprise. And finally he admonishes us to make a shift, saying “A new consciousness is developing which sees the Earth as a single organism and recognizes that an organism at war with itself is doomed. We are one planet.” 

Carl Sagan's "Who Speaks for Earth?" from COSMOS

After almost thirty years we still seem no closer to his call to vision the superorganism - to awaken our global heart. To do this would require a different kind of consciousness, a new level of connective self awareness that comes from looking in the mirror at collective intelligence, the history of cross-fertilization and syncretism so that we may finally remember the histories we have so long forgotten - stories we still forget today.

In 2009 we will see the release of the first movie about the life of Hypatia. It was filmed on the small island of Malta in the center of the Mediterranean Sea, the home of the 5000 year old remnants of Tarxien temples and where artifacts of the Mother Goddess can be found at Ħaġar Qim and its other archeological sites. The movie is written and directed by gifted filmmaker Alejandro Amenabar. Alexandria’s Neoplatonic philosopher is played by Rachel Weisz.

I first heard about this movie last Summer from Martina Guillaumier, a young, vivacious design historian freshly out of grad school. Martina grew up in Malta where the new movie was filmed with its lavish sets capturing the flavor of Roman era Egypt. Martina carried out historical research for the movie's elaborate set designs. The movie's title, Agora, which means an “open place of assembly” in ancient Greek city-states - the kind of place that Hypatia shared her wisdom with her many male students. 

I met Martina when she came to California to work on a short film, Magdalene with her longtime friend Rebecca Cremona and my Neice, Leslie Lucey, both aspiring filmmakers. It took only moments for Martina and I to jump into a vivid discussion about Hypatia – with her work complete and the film already in post production, Martina knew the context of her story back and forward – as did I from over a decade of my own personal research.

How odd it was to meet anyone who knew so much about this veiled scientist of history! Hypatia had long been my name in Avatar, I too had worked with brilliant designers – but my work was in the early virtual worlds of cyberspace rather than on elaborate movie sets - to build a virtual version of Biblioteca Alexandrina for our VLearn3D world, the first virtual world devoted to international educators in the turn of our own century – the year 2000. 

Rebecca and Martina hosted a little dinner party for Leslie and I that evening with their own favorite homemade Maltese dishes. We toasted together to women of every place on Earth, to every era, and to Hypatia. Across generations we use new and emerging media to pay homage to this great scientist of the ancient world. When her story is freshly unveiled again to the world in 2009, this time on the big screen, the ancient memory of Hypatia will no doubt hit a very raw and fresh nerve in women of today – because her story is still our very own.

Goddess Sculpture, Tarxien Temple Malta [by Joonas L.]

Hypatia now wears a million veils - of blue and black and white - garments of every color and kind. She sleeps in the caves of Huayna Picchu, looks out through the cartone sketched for the Vatican. She walks in the trapezoidal tunnels of Cumae, the string skirted artifacts of Marija Gimbutas, looks at us through the geometric weavings of Mama Agus. Her voice echoes in the silent crystallography of Rosalind Franklin and sings through ancient ink with Elaine Pagels. She hikes the Guatemala highlands with Rigoberta Menchú Tum, warms the seat next to Rosa Parks, lights candles near the lake with Dr. Aung San Suu Kyi.

Hypatia sleeps in the strata of the Goddess, warm in the center of the hearth and home, lighting up the ephemeral halls of cyber libraries, nurturing the dreams of women, both simple and sublime.

We are the ones who must remember her name. 

Visioning Collective I.Q.

“If everybody sees what everybody is thinking, we could raise humanity’s collective I.Q.”  Eileen Clegg, Visual Insight

We’ve all seen timelines. Yet some are so unique that they help us reframe the way we think about time.  This is true of the latest work by graphic journalist and visionary Eileen Clegg. At the turn of this century Eileen took her 25 years of work as a journalist and author and reframed her working process.  She began to capture her narratives with the tools of graphic facilitation: butcher paper, colored pens and a huge, long wall. Originally new to the field of Graphic Facilitation, Eileen was inspired by and worked with visual language pioneers David Sibbet, the late Michael Doyle and Bob Horn. She applied her new process to capture group thought in business and education thinktanks at IBM, Microsoft, the Institute for the Future, TechLearn and many others.

 

Eileen’s murals surround and immerse the brainstorming groups that she is capturing; she visualizes in realtime the subtext of group conversations, mind mapping the process of intensive collaboration. And she is a master at her craft. Her murals are not like any other in the rapidly growing field of graphic facilitation – rather, they represent visual journalism at its best, using a unique combination of artful listening and praxis to elevate the visual recording process to an insightful form of communication artistry.

Clegg’s visual taxonomies are timeless and are drawn from nature – the sun, idea clouds, star people, waves, spheres, pentagons – each image containing words and concepts that converge and bifurcate during the often chaotic group brainstorming process.  She reclaims and reframes ancient symbols and harnesses a deep level of intuition in her artful combination of word and image. Finally she whips up the last iteration of each mural into a tightly interconnected, sweeping vista where, like the self-similarity of fractals, the colorful shape of the whole mirrors the rhythmic order of the parts.

When we first met a number of years ago, I knew Eileen had found the visual key – something as ancient as cave drawings and as emergent as the latest visualization technologies and virtual worlds I spent so much of my time designing, building and studying. We soon joined forces to ground our respective visualization work into a comprehensive history of visual language – but a book like that was nowhere to be found. We knew we would have to write the book ourselves. But that’s another story. Back to the Engelbart timeline mural…

Doug Engelbart is best known as the inventor of the mouse. However, as one of the true pioneers of 20th century computing, he made many other contributions that are known mostly to technologists. These have remained part of the inside story of the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) and Silicon Valley and are just now being glimpsed by the general public as the vision we see everyday as we open up our laptops or sit at our desks enjoying the vistas of cyberspace. 

In 1968 Engelbart demonstrated to a 1000 computer professionals in San Francisco a confluence of tools that are now as common as our fingertips yet none had yet been invented.  This demonstration was called "The Mother of All Demos." SRI and Stanford just celebrated the 40th Anniversary of this prescient demo and Engelbart's contributions in December, 2008.

The Mother of All Demos, 1968 [100 minutes in 9 parts]

Engelbart saw yet a bigger vision that would be the result of a co-evolution in the past 40 years - that of collective intelligence - "Collective I.Q."   Yet in many ways, this potential remains just that - a potential that we have yet to grab onto and use effectively.  Eileen and interactive media producer Valerie Landau wanted to help him tell his story. It had to be told to more than just the technologists. It had to be easy to understand. 

Working closely with Engelbart  for four years on their newly released book, Evolving Collective Intelligence, Eileen and Valerie culminated their writing endeavors by embarking on a room sized mural to visualize the powerful understanding of the Engelbart vision six months ago. Drawing from the context she and Valerie had been outlining for the book, she began with the first version of what was to become an iterative mural process. Seeing the timeline as a narrative, with emotional peaks as well as great leaps in innovation she asked herself, “What is the shape of this story?”

She and Valerie brought their perspective of Doug’s work into the context of a lifetime of innovations in technology. They created the first iteration of the mural, capturing what they hoped would show the essence of Engelbart's ideas charting the potential of the conscious co-evolution of humans and their tools. After the first couple months, as Doug returned to the first iterations to give feedback, the visual details were becoming fleshed out.  Iterations of the mural continued through the next few months, as a leading technology luminaries Alan Kay, Tim O'Reilly, Vint Cerf, Hiroshi Ishii and others offered to Eileen their perspectives and additions.

Doug Engelbart signs an early iteration of the Mural (photo, courtesy Eileen Clegg)

During the months that she worked on the “Co-Evolution of Human Systems and Tool Systems” mural, Eileen did far more than capture over 80 years of Doug’s life, his vision for augmenting human intellect, the evolution of technology and culture of the world around him, and his impact on the history of computing and collaboration. She also brought her own mural innovation process to a new pinnacle with the largest mural she has created to date.

            In December’s Program for the Future conference, programming wizard Mei Lin Fung, her co-leaders and volunteer teams brought together a few hundred of the most interesting visionaries on the leading edge of communication technology, many of whom worked with Engelbart in the 1960s, for an experiment to galvanize Collective I.Q.  Eileen’s 4-foot by 27-foot timeline mural surrounded a two-day swirl of activity. The colorful, sprawling mural felt as if it would come to life.  I was reminded of the powerful centuries-old Bayeaux Tapestry, one of the most exquisite and important landmarks in the history of European art.

 

The Tapisserie de Bayeaux was embroidered in the 11^th century to document the events that led to the Battle of Hastings - the Norman conquest of England in 1066. At almost 230 feet long, this historic tapestry fills a room and includes the auspicious sighting of Hally’s comet which, to the medieval mind, was thought to portend impending doom.  Animation wizard David Newton’s recent media version of the tapestry is a vision to behold, replete with sound effects and music such as “O Fortuna” from the legendary medieval poetic work, Carmina Burana. 

This type of animation is what I visualize co-creating with one of Eileen’s upcoming murals – hopefully for our very own mural now being visioned forth for our book Shape of Thought J

Visioning the Invisible

“In invisible architecture the harmonics are apprehensible only by our intuitions and subconscious aesthetics, and operative only in the twilight zone between conscious and subconscious awareness. This is the area of intuitive and aesthetic formulation.” Buckminster Fuller, The Prospect for Humanity

The workings of the mind have long been invisible to the naked eye. But we are already quite used to images of the human brain. When the first Magnetic Resonance image was published in 1973 and the first MRIs of the human body in 1977, we began to revolutionize the way we envision the structure of the human brain. But mapping the brain is not what it used to be.  Now we see a profusion of realtime mapping of not only the structure but of the activity and function of the brain.

Through new types of brain visualization technologies such as Functional MRI (fMRI), SPECT, Brain Fiber Tractography (DTI)  and 3D computer simulation of the active neurostructure we can visualize mental activity in order to change the way we think. 

Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography or SPECT scans are slices that show blood flow in the brain – the parts of the brain that are the most active - enabling us to compare different mental states side by side. SPECT scans help us understand how drugs influence the way the brain works and has been used in experiments for applied compassion and meditation.

Brain Fiber tractography is a new, noninvasive way to trace fiber bundles in vivo to help us gain a better understanding of brain anatomy. Diffusion tensor datasets from Fiber Tractography enable researchers to follow disease pathways in white matter and track patterns of recovery from congenital diseases.

Diffusion-sensitive nuclear spin tomography scans

These new ways to visualize brain structure and function also enable us to see the sheer beauty and complexity of the human brain in action.

At the same time that we are moving to new vistas of the brain and mind, we are using an ever increasing palette of visualization technologies to map the global mind. Almost daily we witness new ways to visualize our formerly invisible collective thinking process and the global activity of our human species. Like the maps of neurons and synapses, dynamic maps that capture the trails and tendrils of the global brain look a lot what we have been seeing inside the human body.

In the same way that the Earth’s rivers and tributaries look like the arteries and veins in a human body, the dense networks of social communities, aggregated clusters of scholarly citation activity and the topological structure of Internet Router locations look like the latest images of the neurotransmitter action of the neurostructure on the scale of the individual.

Sandia engineer Kevin Boyack, Richard Klavans & Brad Paley generated this map of 800,000 published papers showing the relationships among them & among different scientific disciplines. Featured in the  Nature, Seed and Discover Magazines, 2007

A sampling of social network visualizations from VisualComplexity.com

2001 Internet Topology from CAIDA’s graph visualization tool, WALRUS 

When mapped and visualized, the invisible architecture of crowd behavior and the activity of the collective mind seem to be mirror reflections of the structural characteristics of the human brain.

 Neurotransmitter Action

We routinely map the structure and cross-fertilization of the sciences in science mapping. We visualize the history of knowledge in Knowledge Domain visualization. We see the architecture of communication in social network visualizations and the rapid growth of networked computing in large graph maps of cyberspace.

As Web 2.0 applications scale up, they now come with new tools enabling us to see visualizations that change in front of our eyes in realtime. We can interact with the emergent mosaic of Wikipedia and visualize Semantic coverage of science and technology in Wikipedia through beautiful maps created in 2007 by visionary team Bruce W. Herr II, Todd M. Holloway, and Katy Börner.

 We can navigate through emergent realtime global conversations as tweets on the globe in TwitterVision 3D.

We visually navigate through thousands of popular stories in minutes through Digg’s Arc, / Swarm  and STACK.

 

Today's Digg stories in ARC

We can even visually experience the dynamic heartbeat  of mass emotion through Jonathan Harris’s Lovelines,  We Feel Fine  projects and his I Want You To Want Me museum installation with Sep Kamvar.

Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar discuss "I Want You To Want Me" at MOMA

Scientists, technologists and artists regularly team up on projects shown using large screens to bring a new level of aesthetics to the visualization of data, turning their results into an interactive art experience through museum installations such as MOMA’s "Design and the Elastic Mind" exhibition of 2008.

Visualization technologies today are driven by an aesthetic imperative. It is their very nature to use beauty to encourage collaboration, global stewardship and activism - all hallmarks of the emerging global mind. In the past few years, GapMinder, founded by Ola, Anna and Hans Rosling bring elegance and dynamism to global statistics in order promote sustainability and alleviate world poverty through the UN Millenium Development Goals. 

Hans Rosling demonstrates GapMinder at TED

Now data analysis is a social experience – users share, discover, collaborate, and discuss their data and visualizations in a way previously unheard of. Through a brilliant collaborative experiment created by Mathematician Martin Wattenberg and artist Fernanda Viégas, open access to visualization tools and datasets is rapidly becoming democratized through IBM’s ManyEyes. 

We think nothing of this visual feast of global activity, of shared ideas, of popular peer review because they are already so common and ubiquitous on our computer screens. Most of these new visualization genres emerged in the past decade, many have come from the academic communities, and a large group of these visualization technologies emerge as or are moving toward open source applications. And along with them came a host of visualization aggregators, beginning with Martin Dodge’s online Atlas of Cyberspaces, now a book and website that is still a classic favorite. Now we have more open source initiatives such as the Cyberinfrastructure for Science Center at University of Indiana led by information visualization visionary Katy Börner and a new generation of aggregation web sites such as Visual Complexity, Flowing Data, Scimaps.org, A Beautiful WWW, Information Aesthetics and Accuracy&Aesthetics. 

These new visualization propagators above represent a higher order visualizing ability and our collective urge toward visualization convergence. Their work will soon scale to the newest semantic social networks and collective intelligence hubs that are the forerunners of Web 3.0. Currently TWINE and Freebase are the best new instantiations of this breed of semantic intelligence network. And already the users of these hubs represent of a new kind of networked mind. With these networks in the lead, we are beginning to witness a new generation of social networks comprised of seasoned visionaries.

Let’s look closer at the forerunners of this brand new genre of higher level thought and vision. In my next few entries I will focus on specific visualization visionaries and their tools of choice in order to illuminate three emerging trends in what will soon become visualization of the global mind: Visioning Collective I.Q., Mapping SpaceTime and Visualizing Qualia.  The interesting surprise is that these practitioners are actually returning to some of our most ancient tools and perspectives in order to move us collectively to the next step.

A Visionary Language

 “I start with the seedling. I don’t feel I really know the story if I don’t watch the plant all the way along. So I know every plant in the field. I know them intimately, and I find it a great pleasure to know them.” … “I have learned so much about the corn plant that when I see things, I can interpret [them] right away.” Barbara McClintock, A Feeling for the Organism

Word cloud of the past two blog entries created in Wordle.

The mirror of EcoSentience has a shape and a language that is cropping up everywhere. It is the language of visionaries. You’ve seen it before, I’ve seen it before - we’ve been glimpsing it for years. But we are just now beginning to recognize it through a larger context – through our understanding of the emergent global mind.

Our newest visualization technologies are beginning to hold up an accurate reflection of the superorganism of collective thought.  These patterns are biological, they are scale independent – the patterns we see when we use our powerful lenses to explore the outer reaches of the cosmos and the inner dimensions of the cell.  Visionary language mirrors the history of knowledge, the neurostructure of synaptic behavior, the self-assembly of crowd consciousness, the ubiquitous mobility of swarm behavior, the ephemeral architecture of smart mobs.  But it does more – it mirrors the span of self-awareness to mass introspection by engaging our emotional intelligence through the act of seeing our reflection. In the words of biologist Barbara McClintock, it offers us “a feeling for the organism.”

Like Nature herself on the scale of the grand to the invisible, the activity of the global mind is beautiful. The mirror images of self-reflexivity delicately weave a fabric of mind that is, quite simply, gorgeous to behold. It is the gift of visuospatial intelligence, a characteristic mode of thinking that is more prevalent in brains of women, of musicians, artists, dancers – perhaps that is why our visualization technologies have made way for aesthetics relatively early in their decade long evolution – they are ushering in an entirely new artform. 

The newest patterns of data and information are not merely stunning - they feel good to look at. This beautifully emergent visionary language is already capturing and rendering the organism of thought, dimension, biology, history, knowledge and time on multifarious scales – for all to see and marvel at. Yet not happy to simply marvel at it as art, we can logically toggle around this language from various scales and points of view to engage in a functional dialogue with its message.

Since I call it a reflection, a “mirror” let’s first look at one instantiation of the reflective organism on the scale of the individual mammal through a special class of neurons called - what else? - mirror neurons. Mirror neurons were proven to exist in the mammalian brain when experiments with macaque monkeys in the late 1980s, demonstrated that the same neurons fired off when they were observing other monkeys doing something they had done before as well as when they actually carried out the action themselves.  Hailing these neurons “monkey see, monkey do neurons,” the results of this study ushered in over a decade of new scientific research on the neural basis of social behavior. The mirror neuron system is said to be the core of our empathic response, hence, these neurons are often called “empathy neurons” or “Dalai Lama neurons.” The first introduction to the notion of to mirror neurons actually excites the sociality of our mammalian brains – no wonder the term has caught on as a popular meme for today’s mobile, connected human.

Mirror neurons are currently at the forefront of studies of the neurostructure and the nature of consciousness, at the heart of the latest studies in artificial intelligence, of philosophy, language and theater - and yes, also in advertising (witness the rash of new marketing books such as Buyology whose author Martin Lindstrom unabashedly touts that he uses the discovery of mirror neurons to expose the “hidden truths behind how branding and marketing messages work on the human brain.”)

In just the last few years, neurologist Vilanur Ramachandran linked the improper development and functioning of mirror neurons to the some of the underlying causes of autism. As Director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at UC San Diego, Ramachandran has been on the leading edge of the intersection of the visual perception and neurology. He is one of the Fathers of the emerging transdiscipline of neuroaesthetics. In Ramachandran’s most recent discussion at Edge.org, he explores what he calls the "Last Frontier of Self Awareness."  Mapping function to structure, Ramachandran identifies “touch mirror neurons” to suggest that mirror neurons not only elicit the empathic response, but also play a role in human introspection and self consciousness. 

In the same way that Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences arose in the early 1980s from his years of looking at the margins of the human brain – the paradoxical underpinnings of autism and genius – Ramachandran takes case histories of obscure and unusual psychological behavior, from Capgras Delusion to Phantom Limb Syndrome, in order to winnow out significant truths about the behavior of our brains. 

We must do the same thing with our first vistas of the emergent global brain as Ramachandran has done with perception and the functioning of the neurostructure. Truth is a liminal thing – it takes place in the margins of self-awareness, in the valleys of thought, in the ambiguous tendrils of idea generation, in the activity of random elements and strange attractors of dynamic systems.  Visualization brings to light these compelling designs too, and makes us comfortable with a new kind of pattern language.

Let’s move from this theoretical view above to a visual feast of global consciousness.  To do that, my next entry will take us on a little journey through the visual landscapes that make up what I see as a language we can now adopt as a toggling mechanism, a Lingua Franca for the global mind -Visioning the Invisible.   

"Mirror Neurons" by Tony DeVarco

Visioning EcoSentience

 “It is time for the birth of EcoSentience. ‘Eco’ comes from the Greek root word oikos, meaning house. ‘Sentience’ means to feel or to be conscious. Viewed from every scale, our home is the universe, the galaxy, the solar system, our biosphere, our bioregion, biome, city, neighborhood – indeed our very cells. Thus, EcoSentience means environmental awareness arising from deep self-awareness, ... a continuous loop of subjectivity, objectivity, and reflexivity.” Earth as a Lens, 2004  

EcoGenesis by Tony DeVarco

Before returning to the archetypal sphere, I feel compelled at the turn of this brand new year to talk a bit more about visioning, vision and visionaries.

I believe there is a different way of looking at the history of our world. Through this alternate view we will be able to shift to a new kind of world, an emergent world of beauty, truth and stewardship. To make this shift we must act together to re-vision our heritage and redefine our collective task. To see and to act, each and every one of us must embrace the role of the visionary. And if we do, the world we are poised to create and to witness in the 21^st Century will be very different than the one currently outside our doors. It is a world of compassion and pluralism, of tolerance, of multiplicities; it is a syncretic domain of interactionism, of mass intelligence, of manyworlds – the rise of quantum consciousness, and the shared embrace of the global mind.

At the end of first decade of the 21^st century we are beginning to witness the unveiling of a world emerging through a series of memes that are rapidly taking hold. This is what Doug Engelbart described as Collective I.Q.; Howard Bloom deemed it the emergent Global Brain or the Mass Mind, Ray Kurzweil coined it the Singularity. Kevin Kelly sees this hive mind or the global superorganism as a manifestation of the OM, or One Machine. Nova Spivack most recently suggests it is a higher order thinking capability with collective consciousness – the meta-individual. This viewpoint, Nova notes, is evolving as our communication tools (such as the semantic web) help to facilitate greater awareness and self-organization. Artificial Intelligence pioneer Steve Omohundro sees the potential of this phenomenon being shared by machines and humans alike, as self aware systems that have the ability to contain and convey wisdom as well as knowledge.

All of the views above were preceded by Peter Russell's call for us to look at planet Earth as a single organism in his 1983 film "Global Brain" and long before him by the vision of Buckminster Fuller.

  The synonymous memes above emphasize the distributed nature of intelligence and the importance of global consciousness, a view whose time has come.

  In 1975 biologist Edward O. Wilson shook the humanities and the sciences alike when he first released his book that originally invented the term sociobiology – asserting that biology influences social behavior and cultural evolution in the most essential ways. This view received monumental criticism for its first few decades while it began to take the age old nature/nurture debate into a completely new realm. With his newest book, Superorganism, the above memes may now be propagated to a new level once again, this time grounded in both computing and in the biological sciences – carbon and silicon, intertwined as as never before. 

As Project Blue Brain completes its first phase, allowing us to visualize the activity of the neurostructure of the brain through the state of the art 3D visualization technologies, Wilson and co-author Bert Hölldobler help us see that the superorganismic traits of social insect societies such as bees and ants mirror the same principles as the neurostructure of the individual human brain. At the same time, writers, psychologists, artists, actors, neurologists and artificial intelligence communities are ignited by the profound ripple effect from the discovery that mirror neurons in the brain demonstrate the biological roots of the empathic response and hold the key to cohesive group behavior.

  We can no longer deny that the group evolution is characterized by the same aggregate, autopoeitic behaviors as individual intelligence. We already share this group mind in our individual mind.  We are finally becoming aware of its global presence and its transformational power.

  Although the global community is experiencing our greatest world challenges to date, this emergent age of delicious entanglement carries with it a new vision for humanity as well – an opportunity to rise to our next evolutionary moment of self-reflexivity. Only now, we must rise together. We must collectively find a way to toggle effortlessly back and forth between the global mind and our own individual POV.

  Each of us already, often unwittingly, unveils a scale independent view of consciousness and distributed self-awareness every time we open up the ephemeral vistas of collaborative cyberspace.  I am sure we are finally reaching a time when the global brain idea, the superorganism and singularity perspective will not be likened to a cult phenomenon, a hyperbolic claim or merely a utopian vision of technology changing humankind.

  Taking this back to Earth, I love to combine James Lovelock’s Gaia (Earth as a single organism) meme with those discussed above, while at the same time embracing Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose’s quantum physics model for the invisible interactions that happen in the microtubules of the brain - quantum consciousness. I suggest this is the perspective of EcoSentience - a return to seeing Earth as a quantum organism. We will soon be able to envision the pulsations of the organism and the global mind through visualization convergence in the birth to the geospatial, semantic web.

  Over a decade ago, visionary Barbara Marx Hubbard  pointed out that our generation’s zeitgeist and potential is an era of “conscious evolution” or the “evolution of evolution.” And in recent years we have begun to use technology to aid spiritual transformation with programs that have attempt to track and ground the presence of the collective human mind in science and practice – with programs such as the Global Consciousness Project (started at Princeton and Edinburgh Universities) and HeartMath’s Global Coherence Initiative. Many more of us are beginning to coalesce our shared intention and to heed Marx Hubbard's call.

As we become more comfortable embracing transformation as a modus operandi, and global consciousness as a compelling way to perceive our world, we will find that Collective Visioning is our key to collaborative transformation and the rise of the self aware superorganism.  Now is the time to collectively look into the mirror of EcoSentience and see our conscious reflection. I suggest we already know how to answer the question, “What do I look like?”

Thinking in Archetype

"What is stirred in us is that faraway background, those immemorial patterns of the human mind, which we have not acquired but have inherited from the dim ages of the past." Carl Gustav Jung

To embrace a vision that can span many scales at once, we must turn from the tools of scientist to the gifts of the poet and artist – the ability to think in archetype.

The Greek roots of the word archetype are arkhe (“first” or “original”) and typos (“model” or “type”).  In myths and folktales, anthropomorphic gods and goddesses acted as archetypes for the dimensions of human behavior. Gods and goddesses were universal prototypes for the broad range of human experience and they still loom large in our collective memory. In the early 20^th century, Carl Gustav Jung presented the notion that these archetypes represented “landmarks” of the psyche and the collective unconsciousness – to look behind these humanized landmarks Jung reached back almost 2500 years to Plato’s ideal forms - the five geometric solids.

Plato’s early references to “ideal forms” were the geometric solids of Pythagoras – simple shapes, all with perfect symmetry. Yet Pythagoras, the Western world’s Father of philosophy, of math and music, received his understanding of these archetypal forms from the East – from Asia, Mesopotamia, Egypt - and brought this knowledge back to Greece and Italy where he set the foundations of modern Philosophy. 

To historian of myth Mircea Eliade, architect Keith Critchlow and anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss, our pan cultural architectures reflect the universal logic that is found in ancient archetypes. From the rippling architectures of human behavior to the shape of our built environment we carry forth these ancient symmetries, often without knowing it.  We speak together in the language of archetype - reviving, rebuilding, recasting our rhythmic heritage, over and over again. Like Indra’s jeweled net, where everything is both self-similar and the mirror reflection of everything else, humans have always paid subliminal homage to the natural archetypes of ideal form.

Thinking about a scale independent view, can we look to the natural world for such an “ideal form” that could span the spectrum of scale in what Lewis Thomas described 35 years ago as “biomythology”? If we live in a universe of signs and natural symbols, is there a landmark image that recurs on every scale, from the nano to the astro? A ballast that can help us move seamlessly through the micro dimension to the macro dimension? 

There is. Surprisingly, it is a form that is as simple as it is mysterious, as common as it is universal, a shape that is natural, ancient, symmetric – a form that is at once eloquent, iconic, and timeless. Just from our human scale, the scale of the naked eye, this form would have to be…

• a form so normal and ubiquitous that we are walking on it every waking hour  
• something on the largest scale  that we look out at every day or night   
• something small enough to hold in our palms or roll between our fingers
• a form that even a baby could play with
• an object we could make with leather, bamboo clay, stone, metal or glass
• an edible delicacy that we can pop into our mouths or peel and eat, that grows on trees, bushes and vines
• a natural object that can be as tiny as a grain of sand or as large as a planet
• a living organism
• something with an inside and an outside that we can build, walk inside of, marvel at or use as a tool

Inevitably, the first form we are all too familiar with is so common and obvious that we think we already know everything there is to know about it. Perhaps that is why we haven’t looked at it closely enough as the universal archetype, the Mother of all signs. 

It is time we remind ourselves of the power of the archetypal sphere.